Word: heros
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This particular actor-saving ploy on Sellars' part costs him an entire half of the play's plot. No one in the audience who has not read Much Ado About Nothing beforehand can make sense of the main romantic plot of Claudio (Paul Redford) and Hero (Grace Shohet) without the separate Dons...
...nothing" of the play's title should apply to both plots; Claudio's charges of Hero's infidelity are the negative side, and the bond between the celebrated Beatrice and Benedick, constructed of words alone, the positive. There's meaning in Shakespeare's juxtaposition of his parody of the hackneyed romance embodied in Hero and Claudio and the thoroughly unorthodox relationship between Beatrice and Benedick. Sellars, however, is too busy moving his dummies around the stage to waste any time developing Shakespeare's main theme...
...effective, the former in a huge chestplate that makes it virtually impossible for him to sit down. Sellars' direction of their scenes, too, seems more careful. He dims the lights to a ghostly blue and has his pianists play wild chase music for their detection of the plot against Hero...
...Hero! What a Hero hadst thou been...
...throwback to the fighting love stories Hollywood used to do in the 1930s: hero and heroine take an instant dislike to each other, then find grounds for affection in the course of squabbling their way through the picture. In this case the premise involves a successful perfume manufacturer (this ties in with Streisand's famous proboscis-get it?) whose accountant has absconded with all her assets except an inactive prizefighter (Ryan O'Neal). The boxer had been kept on the payroll as a tax loss, which suited him just fine since boxing was the sort of sport...